Speaking of Fourth Grade: What Listening to Kids Tells Us About School in America

INTRODUCTION

Ispent a year on the road in Missouri to find out what fourth graders say about school. I interviewed ninety-three girls and seventy-three boys from different types of schools—public, charter, independent, Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, and Jewish—located in communities of varying incomes and geographic regions. My face-to-face conversations with students between 2011 and 2012 generated 130 hours of interviews.

You learn a lot when you ask a fourth grader to tell you about a typical day at school. After a minute of informal chitchat while getting settled, I began every interview with the same question: What’s it like here? Responses to this simple question give you a sense of what children notice, as well as a deep sense of how place shapes experience—children’s words and how they are spoken express a social, cultural, and economic landscape, the meaningful context in which they do what they do. As you read the following selections, note the kids’ whereabouts.

I get here and then in about two hours it’s lunch and then in about three or two hours it’s second recess, and then after that, thirty minutes and it’s time to go.

—Gabriel, white, rural, public school, low income

You come here and eat breakfast, and then you go to your class and do your morning work, and then in the afternoon you do your work and if you don’t do your work, you have to finish your work, in fact if you don’t finish your work you have to finish your work during recess and if you don’t finish your work during recess, you have to finish it during lunch and that’s enough time for you to finish your work, and after that, you go back to the classroom and do science and math and stuff and the reading, like review, and then we do our double dip, our double dip is like finish your work that you didn’t have time to do, and then if you have time, you can go outside for an extra recess.

—Farid, African American, urban, charter school, low income

So before school starts we go outside and we can play stuff and then the bell rings and then we line up. And then we, like, wait for the classes to come in. And then we go upstairs, get our stuff done. Then we have this thing called the assignment notebook. And you write down all your assignments and your homework and then we do morning prayer on the intercom. And then we do like a subject, mostly English, and then we do, like, math or social studies and then it goes to morning recess and that’s, like, ten-fifteen to ten-thirty and then that goes into reading or something and then we go to lunch at twelve. Then after lunch we have a recess. Then if it’s Tuesday or Thursday we go to PE. Before lunch some days we go to music on Wednesday and Friday and then PE’s on Tuesday/Thursday at one. And two or so is when we do art.

—Sean, white, urban, Catholic school, middle income

Typical day I come in, I sign in, they usually have something written on the board and then you don’t really have a seating chart so I sit down and if they say, Read a book or hang out but you can talk quietly, or there’s an activity or we gotta go to something extracurricular . . . and then we start our morning classes, well right now the schedule’s all messed up because we have Grandparents’ Day. And then we had a play, a fifth-grade play on the American Revolution. And then I have classes. My homeroom is social studies and reading, and then we go to PE, which isn’t just the bus driver’s cousin getting together playing kickball, because it’s usually Capture the Cone. Sometimes we do units, like, we did a volleyball unit and then we did a flag football unit, and then we go to lunch, and it’s not assigned seating. . . . And then after lunch is recess, which is twenty-five minutes, twenty-five to thirty minutes depending. Then we read aloud for about fifteen minutes, and then we go to math and writing, and then it’s specialists which are drama, music, arts. Arts we have trimester in arts, we just finished our drama trimester then we’ll go on to our visual art trimester and we’ll go to our language art, Latin, our extra language, or French or Spanish, and then occasionally in the middle of your first class, they’ll have French and Spanish. You can choose French or Spanish. Most people choose Spanish now because, you know all these explanations, like it originates more to the language than French does and, you know, just there’s more demand for it, I don’t know, I’m not an expert I’m just a kid [laughs]. And then, I take French and I like that, and then after specialists it’s come back, oh yeah, I forgot: PM break is in between afternoon classes and specialists, which is a short, ten-minute break, which you can, if you missed homework, I mean if it’s big, like a paper, and you need thirty minutes to write it, then you’re taking recess and PM break, but if it’s just something small like a worksheet they hand out in class . . . and then at the end of the day we come out and they have a big assignment board [whispers] do they have it here? [regular voice] yes this, so it’ll say, you know: spelling packet. . . . I have a planner and we write down and it’s designed exactly like this [pointing to the board]. Then we fill out our planner, and then I go to aftercare, I sign in at aftercare and then I play soccer.

—Robert, white, urban, private school, high income

Gabriel, Farid, Sean, Robert, and 55 million other American kids all go to school, but what they make of school is complicated by who they are, where they are, and what their schools are like. This book confronts these complications. In quantity and quality, Gabriel’s 33-word summary says something very different from Robert’s 443-word description. The curricular richness of Robert’s school stands in stark contrast to the monotony Farid recounts: Farid repeats the word work nine times.

Broad categorical differences between public, independent, and charter schools are not state specific; in significant ways, the demographics of Missouri mirror social and economic patterns of the continental United States as a whole. So how do children’s ideas compare with what older people say and do about schooling? What is consistent with our collective assumptions? What is counterintuitive? What meshes beautifully with findings in sound education research and what indicates that adults running schools are not keeping up with best practices or are misaligned by design? As a person who spends a lot of time in schools, I had reasonable hunches.

WHERE WE ARE

Loud and powerful voices surround, mandate, and evaluate what educators in public schools do—policy makers, journalists, boards of education, families, and those who constitute, educationally speaking, the lay community. The lives of American children are contested fields on which the notions and interests of adults compete over how best to educate, train, nurture, and otherwise acculturate young people. Depending on your ideas, the verbs matter. Whether the national conversation is about phonics, reading, test scores, STEM programming, global competitiveness, having less homework, assigning more homework, school uniforms, minutes of daily recess, gym, art, music, or the effect of grades and rewards on learning, at stake are adult values, adult desires, adult needs, and adult power.

At the same time, cutting-edge research in the social and hard sciences—including the sociology of schooling, sociology of childhood, critical discourse analysis, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, character education, digital and other open-sourced models of learning, human biology, and more—suggest practices, initiatives, and innovations that would, if brought to scale, make for deeply meaningful learning for all children. Mindful of the sticky and politically loaded assumptions in circulation about what should be happening in schools, this book slips under the relationships among adults in order to listen to the younger people who have to be in schools from eight to three every day. My aim was to infuse what they say into what’s being said about them. Specifically, what are kids learning in the context of:

•our federally mandated diptych: No Child Left Behind (unfunded) and Race to the Top (funded);

•the deepening and expanding stake of private business interests in schools and the turn to curricular materials as profit generators;

•ongoing attempts to strip teachers of autonomy and classroom power;

•an aggressive push for English-only schools and classrooms during the most expansive period of immigration since the early twentieth century;

•elaborate forms of surveillance, behavior-management policies, and punishment in some schools, all of which can push children into the criminal justice system;

•standards, measurements, metrics, summative tests, and other bureaucratically driven systems of high-pressure accounting in education;

•increasingly inequitable and regressive distribution of wages and wealth in the United States since the early 1970s.

As should be obvious, these policies and practices have affected students and schools differently. Kids who come from communities of higher social status and greater access to goods and services go to private and public schools that do things quite differently from schools that serve other people’s children, to borrow a phrase from educator and researcher Lisa Delpit. The pedagogical and curricular distinctions among public, charter, and rural schools hundreds of miles apart are likely to be far fewer than those between an elite private and poor public school only a mile from each other.

From the cozy neighborhood parish school to the rigidly controlled charter, the best practices are simply not evident to a degree that matters to enough children. Emphasis on enough. In education, the lag between research and practice at scale is notorious and unconscionable. If there were such a lag in medicine or consumer product development . . . well, there never would be such a lag in those fields.

WHAT IS SCHOOL?

Schools are institutions designed and controlled by grown people. Any one school represents only one way that human beings can learn how to be in the world. Whether they are walked, bused, or carpooled into school, kids assemble all kinds of theories trying to make sense of what they’re doing and why.

There’s boundaries and stuff in school but at home there’s not really stuff you can and can’t do. Like if you have a computer you have to do math games at school or whatever the teacher says you have to do, but at home if you have a computer you can do any game really. Kids go to school just to prepare them for life ahead of them. Some kids say that school is just like a waste of time but in other countries, like India and stuff, kids don’t even go to school. The girls don’t go to school. The boys mostly do. They’re really lucky if they ever move to the U.S.A. ’cause everyone gets school. Well, most everyone gets school. But in India not a lot of people do. And other countries. And I read in a book that you have to be in eleventh grade till you even get a desk. They just worked on the floor. Yeah, we studied India last year in third grade.

—Jessica, white, outer-ring suburb, public school, middle income

For Jessica, school has boundaries; home does not. School prepares you for life and in the U.S.A., everyone gets school. Well, most everyone . . .

In the last one hundred years the notion of school has ossified into a set of taken-for-granted assumptions: school is a place that mostly isolates young people from the work and lives of older people (except for bus drivers, teachers, administrators, and custodians), sorts them according to age, ranks them according to achievement, and divides knowledge into ruled disciplines that make claims about what is known, what there is to know, and why it’s important to know.

There are social, historical, and political reasons for schools evolving this way, for knowledge being carved into disciplines and forced into hierarchies, for people valuing certain kinds of knowing over others. One consequence of schools being this way is that there are those whose temperaments, intellects, and gifts are well suited to school-as-practiced, and those whose temperaments, intellects, and gifts are less adaptive to school. Kids are always both growing as individuals and interacting with other people; temperament and intellect are dynamic and fluid, not embossed at birth. A person might be quite comfortable in school in first grade, for example, but miserable by fifth. Or vice versa. The important thing is that all human beings have an innate interest in learning, possess an ability to learn, and tend to have ideal ways in which they can and do learn. These too may change over time.

So people learn no matter what. Where curriculum has been stripped to computation and regurgitation, kids learn that school is for simpleminded people, and critical thinking happens in nonschool settings. And even where curriculum is rich and challenging, individual temperament can obstruct learning in a classroom setting. One student I know was so bored in a middle school math class, he wound up learning pi to the thirty-fifth digit because he spent forty-two minutes every day staring at the number wrapped as decoration around the ceiling molding. Such students are not failing to learn in school. They are simply not learning what the adults in their school are trying to teach. It should go without saying that an inability of a child to learn in school what we say they are supposed to learn signals, in most cases, something wrong with content, something wrong with pedagogy, or something wrong about the way content and pedagogy are integrated.

Tinkering toward utopia is what David Tyack and Larry Cuban have called attempts to improve public education. We Americans do like to tinker. And yet, given the ever-evolving heterogeneity of our national community, who today constitutes this tinkering we? Who are our children? In public and public charter schools, 3.7 million teachers teach 50 million American children between the ages of five and seventeen. Another 5 million children attend private schools. The U.S. Department of Education estimates the number of students will grow to 60 million by 2030. By 2100, the pattern of steady increase is expected to result in a total of 94 million school-age children, reflecting an increase of 42 million from 2000. A visit to the DOE website offers a dizzying and captivating amount of data dutifully collected and analyzed for our benefit. Short-term projections by the National Center for Education Statistics say we’ll need roughly 4.2 million teachers by 2021. Anthropologically speaking, that’s a lot of child rearers.

Inside these numbers are facts about the cultural and ethnic identities of these teachers and children. Public school teachers in kindergarten through twelfth grade classrooms are mostly white (83 percent) and mostly women (76 percent). Until now, these mostly young, white, female teachers have been teaching mostly white students. Now the ratios are changing. The aggregated numbers of African American, Latino, Asian, and kids of multiracial heritage are rising relative to the number of white children. By 2100, about 64 percent of all American children are expected to be from nonwhite families, reflecting a long-term rise from 35 percent in 2000. Schools of education are responding to demographic change by revising educator preparation programs; coursework and preservice practicums are in transition around the country. Bottom line: the we’s are changing and public schools will need to respect increasingly complex student identities.

My own formal education straddled different domains. In elementary school I attended P.S. 6 in New York City. As a consequence of political turmoil in the late 1960s, I was pulled from there after third grade and sent to private school. Following high school, I was an English major at a liberal arts college in New England. Decades later, I studied at a land-grant research university in the Midwest.

Like my path as a student, my role as a teacher has crossed boundaries. In the mid-eighties, I spent time as a substitute teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools while working as a freelance writer. From 2002 to 2008, in addition to writing, I taught in the St. Louis Public Schools, where I worked with students in grades two through five. I’ve taught high school English in a Catholic all-girls school, and undergraduate and graduate education courses at a public university. In the summer of 2013, I was hired as an instructional coach in the Normandy School District, where I hope to remain. My experience as an itinerant classroom leader dramatizes a truth for all educators: teaching identities can be dynamic and complex, too.

Looking back in time, I am two generations removed from Moses Feldman, a pogrom-fleeing Russian Jew who, upon arriving in Texas, traded in scrap leather, a business that failed, and scrap metal, a business that flourished. A hundred years ago, my great-grandfather figured out that unwanted machines were more valuable than cured animal hide. I am likewise into salvage. When it comes to the way we have organized schools, we have to figure out what’s scrap, what’s worth saving, and what might be transformed into something better.

This book illuminates what scholars call the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum refers to the lessons conveyed through the processes and products of schooling itself without a single word being spoken. What kinds of cultural capital—norms, values, beliefs, and expectations—accrue to which people? The hidden curriculum is never formally assessed. So how can we listen in a way that hears what children have learned tacitly? I suspect that Jessica has learned to feel grateful for school—in contrast to her friend who says it’s a waste of time—because she has learned that girls in India don’t get to go to school at all, boys don’t get desks until eleventh grade, and kids from India are lucky to move to the United States. At this moment, Jessica believes that life in the United States is better than life in India. That is a value judgment she has learned tacitly in school.

In 1983, Shirley Brice Heath wrote about how children from different social groups in the Piedmont Carolinas acquired language in their homes and communities. Her foundational book, Ways with Words, described how these practices related to what was happening in school. Thirty years later, teachers are still chastising students for speaking something called broken English, as if the ways children tell stories, express love, and get things to happen in the world were something that could break. From a different perspective, Jonathan Kozol has written about schoolchildren’s lives. What he calls an apartheid system of education permits the children of wealthy, mostly white families to receive one kind of schooling, and the children of poor, mostly African American families, a worse and separate kind of schooling. Far less studied is what’s happening in our exurban regions of sprawl, in rural communities, and in schools where there is a cultural or ethnic mismatch between teachers and the students in their classrooms. In general, as sociologist Sean Reardon has written, kids from wealthy families have better grades, score higher on standardized tests, participate in more extracurricular activities, assume more leadership in school government, and have higher rates of college enrollment and completion than do kids from poor and middle-class families. Of course, high-pressured academic environments like these have their own problems: a lively trade in brain-boosting pharmaceuticals like Adderall, as well as widespread cheating, depressing cynicism, and grade grubbing indicate that all is not well among the elite, either. Writing forty years ago, Jonathan Kozol termed what these kids get from school the desensitizing education of the victimizer.

Linda Darling-Hammond, an education scholar and activist who was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, has called for reforms designed to support educational quality and equality of opportunity for all students. Many policy makers are trying to steer the country toward the goals Darling-Hammond has described: protections of civil rights in education; intelligent, reciprocal, and transparent accountability systems; adequate resource distribution; strong professional standards; federally funded grants and awards to support meaningful innovation; and schools organized for student and teacher learning. Were these goals met, we would see an end to what Darling-Hammond has called educational redlining, a circumstance in which a child’s education is a function of social and demographic factors beyond her control.

For decades, researchers and practitioners have been proposing humanist transformations in education. Kris Gutiérrez, Deborah Meier, Michael Cole, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Carol Lee, Elaine Richardson, and so many others inspire multiple ways forward. But any and all ways forward have to respond to kids where they are. Anyone who understands what learning means understands that learning happens in social and psychological places impossible to monitor from a distance. This book represents what children say when they’re three feet away.

I selected fourth grade for this project for several reasons. First, as a writing teacher in an urban public school, I spent three years with the same group of children through their second-, third-, and fourth-grade years. Those years enabled me to see individual and group development in a nontraditional classroom setting. Second, many fourth-grade children are capable of expressing complex abstract thoughts in words. Some can even induce general theories from personal observations. Susan, whom I interviewed for this study, said:

Even though we’re a little bit older it still doesn’t mean that we can take certain things. And that just because we’re a little bit older we can do higher stuff, because there are some kids, kind of like me—I’m really, really good with some things, but I’m also really bad at other things. And so you can’t do perfect, but I always try my best and sometimes my parent—my mom, just pushes me a little bit too much, and it gets me really, really upset because it’s just like, sometimes I just want to scream at her, I’m not perfect, Mother! And that gets me really, really upset. Also, I have ADD which is Attention Disorder. Sometimes I really can’t pay attention. That makes it harder for me to do certain stuff. There’s a special pill that I take. It doesn’t make me feel any different, and I kind of feel the same every single day, but yeah, it makes a difference and it helps me concentrate better on what I’m doing, or it helps me go to the teacher for a long period of time, but at night it wears down by eight o’clock maybe? Six, seven, five, it starts wearing down and that’s when I get really, really cranky and it’s kind of harder for me to pay attention to my mom or dad if they’re trying to help me on something. I don’t take it on the weekend. I can still concentrate because my body has gotten used to it, and it acts as if I have taken it. But I still need to take it every single day. It would be better if I took it on the weekends, but I mostly do not.

—Susan, Jewish, suburban, middle income

Susan begins with a general statement, then supports and develops her idea with concrete examples. This rhetorical move represents a huge leap. Younger children are more likely to represent and store experience in action and image. Beginning around seven, children will use oral language (in addition to action and image) to think abstractly. And by the time they are classified into a social group we call fourth graders, children in the United States can range from highly literal (action- and image-based thinkers) to remarkably capable of comprehending and speaking in abstractions. By nine, most children are capable of reading and writing. Cognitively able to assemble concepts into clumps of similar concepts, they can compare and contrast. At least, that’s what we expect. Most of the children I interviewed were capable of abstract reasoning to some extent; developmentally, a few were either extremely literal or extremely likely to generalize.

A third reason I focused on fourth grade is because American children are by then generally expected to have developed an ability to identify and comprehend multiple genres of printed text. The Common Core State Standards for fourth grade expect that students will:

Explain major differences between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings, descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking about a text. By the end of year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts. Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web pages) and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears.

Missouri has shifted to the Common Core, but we have not yet created or adopted a testing instrument aligned to these standards. As of this writing, we still test to the less rigorous Show-Me standards, which date from 1996. In any case, most Missouri fourth graders do not meet even these standards. Only 34 percent of our state’s fourth graders were designated as